


no other faith is light enough for this place

by EnglishLanguage



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Baggage, Other, Sam has a Panic Attack, Self-Hatred, Sparring As a Coping Mechanism, Tron is Terrifyingly Competent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 12:02:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21035939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishLanguage/pseuds/EnglishLanguage
Summary: “Surrender.”"No." On his knees, Sam burns alive with the flames of his defiance. He doesn't let the pain hold him back.//Sam picks a fight with his own self-doubt.





	no other faith is light enough for this place

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a line from "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness" by The National.  
That's just what I was listening to when I wrote this, so... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

“Surrender.”

“No.” On his knees, Sam burns alive with the flames of his defiance. He doesn't let the pain hold him back. “No,” he sobs, and tastes copper, “I won’t."

“Then stand up and fight me.”

Breathing through lungs chafed raw and ragged, Sam braces torn knuckles against the floor, nearly slips on the slick of his own blood. Something deep inside him has frayed, begun to collapse and unravel. He can feel it in the way his jaw hangs loose, unable to close around the aching swell of his lower lip and bitten tongue. He can feel it in the blunt force contusions wreathed like red-hot wire around his shins, his forearms, and in the way that pain and weariness cripple his every movement. His nerves are shot, twitching, and _panic-frustration-sickness_ throbs like static behind his eyes. But he stands.

But he raises shaking hands that no longer curl into fists: _ come and get me. _

Infuriatingly, Tron _ waits _for Sam to find his footing and stop swaying. The monitor cocks his head to the side, staring at Sam, eyes narrowed against a rivulet of liquid energy that trickles down from the pixellated fractures above his left eyebrow. Sam blinks through his own nausea--an afterimage of Tron’s neon blood flashes in the darkness behind his eyelids.

Sam shuffles forward. He swings.

Tron steps inside the stuttered arc of Sam’s cross, circles around back, wraps a hand around Sam’s upper arm. Frantic, Sam flails. He aims an elbow at the back of Tron’s head, and Tron ducks his head low against Sam’s scapula, pinning Sam’s arm to his chest. Writhing, Sam digs a heel into Tron’s foot, and Tron drops his weight, pulls Sam under like they’re sparring in water, not air, and either way, Sam drowns…

Tron takes him down gentle. He kicks Sam’s shaking knee to the side and catches him as he crumples.

Tender, one hand cradles Sam’s cut cheek, smearing congealed blood across his skin, and lowers his head to the ground. _ Vicious, _another hand chokes fingerprint bruises into Sam’s palm, twisting until Sam’s arm locks out at the elbow and wrist, his bones grinding. 

“Surrender.”

Sam sobs, rolling the side of his forehead against the cool, glassy floor of the Arena. Unyielding, Tron’s knee drills into his ribs. 

“Surrender, user,” the program repeats, his voice a soft murmur, but Sam resists, thrashing, feeling the last of his stamina drain from his numbed fingertips. Tron is a stone, a mountain, unshaken by the decayed and uneven winds of Sam’s storm. 

_ It isn’t fair. _

Tron pulls Sam’s wrist to the side, and the pain and pressure build in his bones and _ Sam can’t take it anymore. _

He taps.

Immediately, Tron drops his arm, lets Sam pull his wrist to his chest and curl around his aching stomach, lets him shake apart and give in to exhausted tears. “Sam-”

“‘M fine,” he whimpers. Blood-tinged saliva bubbles up between his lips, pops, and stings as it trickles down his scraped chin.

Tron emits a faint noise of… distress, of sympathy, of _ something. _(Sam feels his cheeks and neck flush cold with humiliation.) Impossibly careful, the monitor’s hands catch the curve of Sam’s shoulder and roll him over; Sam just closes his eyes and lets it happen, lets Tron scan him, hook arms beneath Sam’s and drag him back against the Arena wall. 

“Sit up, Sam. It’ll help you breathe.”

Sam can’t. He tries--_and he can’t. _He’s shaking too hard. Tron crouches behind Sam, his knees digging into Sam’s back, and he props up Sam’s aching body. The manhandling hurts, so Sam inserts a trembling hand between his teeth, gnaws on his knuckles just to stay quiet, and waits out the discomfort as Tron arranges himself behind Sam. Insistent hands gather Sam close, leaning his head and body back against the program's chest; two muscled arms wrap around Sam’s abdomen and legs bracket his torso on both sides, taking Sam's weight.

This feels good. Safe. And it shouldn't, because the hand wiping blood off of Sam's cheek is the same one that broke his skin in the first place. Limp and trembling, Sam pushes the thought aside, doesn't resist Tron as the program takes Sam’s hand out of his own mouth and nudges Sam's face into the soft length of his throat. Without anything to bite down on, Sam burrows gratefully into warm skin, clenching his teeth against the pain and struggling to _ breathe. _

“You did well.”

A tear trickles down Sam’s cheek, slips down his jaw and into the collar of his gridsuit. “No,” he whispers. “I didn’t.” Truth is, he’s not good enough. He’s never good enough.

“Sam,” Tron chides, and his voice is so full of caring, of confidence in Sam, that it hurts, scorching him like alcohol poured into his wounds. “Alan_One created me to fight for the users. I'm a firewall; I recognize the parameters of a legitimate threat when I see them. _ You did well.” _

Sam bites back a wobbling gasp, stiffens as some blunt ache in his abdomen worsens, radiating an agony that swells and blossoms hot inside him and _ finally _crests…

He has to ride this out and be strong, for once. He has to break free from the foggy doubt and fear that cling to his brain and clog up his lungs. 

He has to fight.

“Relax,” Tron disagrees, tracing fingers up and down the narrow circuit on Sam’s sternum. “Breathe, user. You need to breathe. Match me.”

Tron’s chest drags against Sam’s back in a steady rhythm, rises and falls in gradual motions. Desperate, Sam seizes onto that constant as the world spins out around him: _ eight in, hold two, eight out. _

_ Eight… eight in… _

_ One, two, three, four…. _

_ Four… _

“In,” commands Tron, tapping a measured, eight-count beat against Sam’s chest, “out. In… out.” 

When oxygen finally seeps into Sam’s lungs, shockingly cold and sweet, he thinks he might start crying again. “Programs,” he says instead, stumbling over the word. “Programs don’t needta breathe. Don’t- They don’t-”

“Sh-h. I know, Sam.” 

Tron doesn’t need to breathe, but he’s doing it anyway, cycling his ventilation on manual to anchor Sam through his panic and fatigue. They probably make a weird scene: the protector of the Grid and a user huddled together on the Arena floor, surrounded by their own scattered blood and voxels.

Sam can't bring himself to care. 

“I’m fine,” he grits out, and he thinks he’s already said it, but he wants (needs) Tron to know. “I- I asked for this. I wanted this. I can handle it, I swear.” And maybe it was stupid to coax Tron, a system monitor, a _ killer, _into an all-out brawl, no holds barred. Maybe Sam had no hope of victory, but he had to try.

He wants to prove that he can protect himself. He wants Tron to stop freaking out whenever Sam’s on the Grid, as if Sam is nothing more than a liability, an easy target for Gridbugs, malware, Clu sympathizers, _ what-the-frick-ever. _

Above all else, Sam wants to show that he’s more than his father. He won’t screw up and fail the Grid like Kevin did. 

Exhaling a quivering sigh (Sam’s head lolls forward, but Tron catches him, tips his forehead back), Sam digs into the jagged bitterness burrowed deep in his chest, pulls out a complaint at random, tries to build himself back up around his bravado. “You didn’t have to put your disks away. After I dropped mine.”

After Tron thoroughly disarmed Sam, simultaneously slicing a long gash into the belly of Sam’s arm. 

“You coulda kept going. Don’t have to coddle me.”

Even as Sam says it, he thinks it’s probably a lie. Still pumping out blood in dull, disconcerting pulses, the cut on his arm flares white-hot; Sam can barely move his hand, as if the wound severed something deep inside the mechanics of his elbow. Concentrating on the wound, he decides that it's actually shallow, and it won’t kill him--Tron was precise, infinitely careful, in his attack.

Another surge of blood washes down the length of his forearm, pooling in the tight wrist of his gridsuit, and Sam huffs out a strangled laugh. Shallow or not, he really needs medical attention.

“Sam?”

“What?” The word catches in the back of his throat, slips off his tongue tight and desperate and thick with a suppressed sob. Sam shuts his mouth, trying to focus on his breathing. _ Slow and easy. He’s okay. He’s alive. _

“Sam Flynn,” Tron sighs, pronouncing his name as if it’s a lecture all on its own, and hauls Sam’s body back up into his grip. Lightheaded, lost and adrift and still blind with the scarlet haze of his adrenaline, Sam hadn’t noticed he’d been slipping down. “You have nothing to prove.”

Sam startles. 

_ What? _Since when?

He shakes his head. “You mispronounced ‘everything.’”

“Nothing,” Tron repeats, voice firm. “You’ve already done more than you know, user.” For a heartbeat, Tron’s careful breathing falters, and in the end, Sam suspects Tron struggles to express his emotions _ at least _ as much as Sam does. 

That’s something Sam can easily read in other people--how knotted up they are inside, whether they release their feelings all neat and careful, or whether they hold them in, keep them close like reeking viscera spilling out of a gut wound. 

And Tron?

Tron is soaked through with the blood of over 2000 cycles’ worth of mangled emotion.

“This system still exists because you repaired it.” Tron’s jaw settles on top of Sam’s head, and he thinks he feels the program’s chin tremble. Or maybe it’s just Sam quaking as he squeezes his eyes tight against a new round of quiet, feverish tears. “_I _exist because you didn’t let me derez. You found me. You brought my user to me, Sam; you healed me. I… was not worthy.”

“‘S really me who’s not worthy,” Sam mumbles into Tron’s shoulder, and the monitor clicks his tongue--by which he means that Sam and Tron both make a sorry pair, that Sam can praise Tron, his hero, and Tron can comfort Sam for eternity, and neither of them will believe the other.

“You did well, Sam,” Tron reassures, _again, _and this time around, a rigid note to his voice _ dares _Sam to try and argue against him. But Sam is sick of sparring. He lets it go, wipes the sticky residue of his tears off on the plated armor covering Tron’s shoulder. “Next time,” the program continues, “you’ll do better.”

Some days, optimism grates against Sam’s heart like asphalt on skin: it's crueler to disguise the inevitable disappointments in Sam's future than it is to lay them out straight. But Tron’s words weigh heavy with a certainty that leaves no room for undue positivity, and Sam almost finds himself hoping.

Even believing.

“Can you walk?” Tron asks, and Sam nearly combusts with laughter--because _ no_\--except if he laughs, he might hurl, so he suffocates the hysteria bubbling up in chest.

“Yes,” he pretends, falling back on his stubborn inability to admit to weakness, which might be the only reason he’s still alive and half-functional today. Sam feels more than sees Tron’s critical glare and, hesitating, changes his answer. “No. I- I don’t think so. Actually.”

Tron's voice goes soft. “Then I’ll carry you.”

_ Surrender, user. _

_ You don’t have to fight anymore. _

Somehow, Tron doesn’t think Sam has anything to prove. Tron isn’t waiting to destroy Sam, to tear the carpet out from under him the second he confesses that his legs are unsteady. “Okay,” Sam consents in a frail whisper--_okay, I’ll surrender--_and Tron twists, tucks an arm under Sam’s knees, and lifts, scattering Sam’s grasp on reality to dizzy pieces. The program's armor hurts where it presses against Sam’s tender ribs, and Sam’s stomach burns, acid-hot, where it folds right on a bruise. (Tron’s repertoire includes a _ brutal _ roundhouse kick.)

Despite the discomfort, though, Sam allows himself to find a center in Tron, to bury his face into the monitor’s chest and block out the world. 

And Tron, as he does best, doesn’t let Sam fall.

**Author's Note:**

> Me: Yoooo I have some ridiculous bruises on my shin from sparring maybe I should write like a drabble about it. Just something short. Just a quick break from my essay.
> 
> Me: *Accidentally spends hours on this*


End file.
